Hanborough: Snapshots from the History of the Parish of Hanborough, Oxfordshire, England

By Stephen Braybrooke-tucker

Starting with the Geology and Topography, it quickly moves on to the early residents and then to the huge effect that the Norman invasion of 1066 had on the people of Hanborough.
It includes a detailed description of the Domesday Book entry for Hanborough and gives a full description of the flour mill. The chapters then talk about the arable land in and around Hanborough during Medieval times, about the Manor and the Peasants lifestyle. We also learn about a bit of naughtiness in the Abbey!
We follow Hanborough through the ages, learning about the dreadful Black Death, and the devastation it caused to thousands of people. We find that Hanborough has connections with America through the Culpepper family who were Patrons of the Living in this parish before they left for the USA.
As we draw closer to the 20th century real changes start to happen; the first schools came to Hanborough, the railways were built giving people a real chance of travel.
The chapters show how this small rural village evolved and how important each tradesman is in their own area. We walk through the village as it was in the 1940s and imagine ourselves knocking on doors and buying sweets at the old sweet shop.
Then war arrives and many young men leave to fight and never return; Hanborough lost many of its young men in both wars.
We are given an insight into the first Churchill who later became the Duke of Marlborough and the building of Blenheim Palace in 1704.
The book ends with short history of the life and death of Sir Winston Churchill whose funeral cortege came to Hanborough railway station, from which he was taken through lines of Hanborough folk to his last resting place in the adjacent village of Bladon

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467882828

Stephen Braybrooke-tucker

Stephen Braybrooke-Tucker was born in 1939 in Newbury, Berkshire, to a family with a history of farming, horticulture and the Church. Several members of his family are authors in their own right. From school he went to an Agricultural College and left with qualifications in Farm Management and Engineering. He then worked for several large country estates, usually supervising the arable work. He met and married his wife, Jeanette in June 1966 while running a Youth Club in his local Church. He moved to Hanborough, Oxfordshire, in 1975 with his wife and two children, Alexandra and Caroline, to be a member of the Arable Team at Blenheim Estates, Woodstock. He was based initially at Millwood Farm, Hanborough, Lower Riding farm, North Leigh and manor Farm, Cassington. He later joined the whole Arable Team based at Park Farm, in Blenheim Park. Retiring early, to support his wife who has Multiple Sclerosis, he then worked as a volunteer with her for Dialability, an Oxford based charity, supporting people with Disabilities. He also helped to organise and run a disability group in Witney hospital and to develop a local Care Group in Hanborough. With his huge knowledge of farming and country ways, plus his fondness for all things historical, he wrote articles over a four and a half year period on events in Hanborough’s history to insert in the village magazine. Putting them together as ‘Snapshots of Hanborough’ he was told that they would make a very interesting read for other people.

Book preview

© 2012 by STEPHEN BRAYBROOKE-TUCKER. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 01/17/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8281-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8282-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Geology and Topography

Chapter 3

More about the Early Residents

Chapter 4

The Domesday Book.

The Entry for Hanborough

Chapter 5

After Domesday

Chapter 6

‘There is a Mill rendering 10s’

Chapter 7

Fields and Names

Chapter 8

More fields and

Trouble with the Abbey

Chapter 9

More about the Manor and

the Peasants lifestyle.

Chapter 10

The Black Death

Chapter 11

Football, Poll Tax, a Riot and another Great Field.

Chapter 12

Masons, Lollards, and a bit of naughtiness in the Abbey!

Chapter 13

Land, Manorial Courts and Sheep,

Chapter 14

The Reformation,

and an Old House

Chapter 15

Mill Field and Lot Meadows.

Chapter 16

Culpeppers, Patrons of the Living.

Chapter 17

Oseney Abbey land,

a Small Cottage, a George Cross.

Smoking, & some Games

Chapter 18

The Manor from 1600 to 1704, Corpus Christi land,

and the Bouchier Estate.

Chapter 19

The Civil War and Hanborough

Chapter 20

Charities and the Poor Law in Hanborough

Chapter 21

A Devon Knight, A new Lord of the Manor and Inclosures.

Chapter 22

Our Northern Boundary, & a little bit about our Brick Industry

Chapter 23

Pay, An Educated Man, Turnpikes, Chapels, The first Schools

Chapter 24

The Coming of the Railway

Chapter 25

1851, Bells, Genévrier, and Beer

Chapter 26

A Major Dodgson D.S.O.; P&O; & Some Hanborough People.

Chapter 27

Some Old Houses, & Archie Thompson

Chapter 28

Working Away; A few Tales;

and a Blacksmith;

Chapter 29

‘When we were young’

Chapter 30

Remembering a Special Time

Chapter 31

More memories from the

early 1900s up to the 1930s

Chapter 32

Shopping for Two Kings

Chapter 33

A Walk through the Parish in 1940

Chapter 34

It’s War Again

Chapter 35

Some Airfields, Planes, Gliders, Small Bombs and Coke Fumes.

Chapter 36

More Houses and a New Playing Field

Chapter 37

More Memories

Chapter 38

Fred Abel: ‘A Gentleman of the Road’

Chapter 39

Sir Winston Churchill

Chapter 40

Decimalisation

This book is dedicated to my Wife, Jeanette.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many people who have given me masses of information that has been of immense help to me in writing this book.

Especially :-

John Bailey, who gave me permission to use his Grandfather’s book ‘Hanborough’ for reference. (Rev. R.C.S.Bailey was Rector for Hanborough from 1911 to 1928. His book is also the place for most references to events noted in my book if you wish to do so; I have not written down references as this book is not an historical record, just observations on other peoples work. (With their permission).

To the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for reference and permission to copy names from Thomas Langdon’s 1605 paintings of Hanborough

To Peter Brittin, Chairman, Hanborough Parish Council, and Frances Hancox, Clerk to the same Council, for access to Hanborough’s Parish Archive, with acknowledgements also to John Edwards and David Hancox.

To Mr.and Mrs.John Brown, for permission to see and copy some of their Photographic Archive.

Oxfordshire History Centre. OT 38.2 & 38.3 Granville Wastie; and others—for reference.

VCH (Victoria County History, Volume 12. Wooton Hundred—South) For reference

Steve Griffiths—for the answer to Chapter 1which is revealed in his book.

Terry Hardacre—for the information in Chapter 2.

To John & Elizabeth Margetts. Farmers from Mill Farm and Pinsley Farm—for field names and the more recent history of Hanborough Mill.

Mrs. Mary Busby of Myrtle Farm—for her memories and Village List 1920-1940.

Annette Simpkins—for additions to her mother’s notes. (Mary Busby)

Sara Ruane—for her memories.

Ann Smith—for her memories.

John Davidson—for his early memories at the School.

Hubert Busby—for his memories.

Don Thompson—for the village business list 1940, and the History of his father, Archie Thompson.

Brian Bowden—for memories, and for lending me his book by John Gibson on ‘Memories of WW2’.

Peter Wright—Oxfordshire Aircraft Collection (OAC), for the history of the scrapped aircraft dumps in Hanborough in WW2.

Mr.A.Rickwood—for his many useful corrections.

Mr. Falloon—for the same.

Mr and Mrs Pritchett and Colleen Burns.

Articles from old editions of the ‘Hanborough Herald’. With thanks to the Editor.

Wikipedia—The copy-write free encyclopaedia, for historical references and images.

To anybody I should have thanked by name, but have unfortunately forgotten, please except this as a personal acknowledgement.

S B-T

INTRODUCTION

I was talking one day to my farming friend John and suggesting to him that it would be an awful shame if the old field names were lost because nobody had recorded them.

He agreed, and told me the field names used at the present time on Mill Farm, from where he had just retired from farming, and Pinsley Farm which he still farms. I had just retired from working for Blenheim Estates, so I knew all the other field names around Hanborough.

He suggested I look at the Rev.R.C.S. Bailey’s book ‘Hanborough’ for more local field names from times past. He also told me about the wonderful colour maps in the library at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. These were painted in 1605 by Thomas Langdon to show the land owned by Corpus Christi in Hanborough, and named many fields from that time.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was researching more than just field names. The chapters stop about 1970—I thought if I went any closer to the present day I’d be asking for trouble!!

I hope you find the book as interesting to read as I did writing it.

SBT. 2011

HANBOROUGH

A look at some interesting parts

of our recorded history

Chapter 1

The parish of Hanborough is not one noted for its wonderful landscape, for its sea views or any major contribution to history. Few celebrities have ever lived here and monarchs have rarely passed over the parish boundaries. There are no really grand houses—apart from our neighbour, Blenheim Palace—and very few renowned gentry have dwelt amongst the inhabitants. Hanborough is a place you pass through, from east to west, from Cotswolds to Chilterns; a country station on a line between cathedral cities. The local landscape is quiet and uneventful, not flat and desolate as the fens, or dramatic and towering as the Lake District or the Yorkshire moors; just a sweet mixture of water meadows, woodland and rolling Oxfordshire fields.

Church Hanborough is the very idea of an English village; stone cottages in a cluster around a mainly Norman church with its tall church spire. Long Hanborough is the modern dormitory village; a few Cotswold stone cottages amid the modern housing estates. In the past gravel pits and stone quarries were worked in between fields of productive farmland. Today the old industrial workings contain modern business parks and leisure areas, and although the farmland is still worked as before, very few people who work it live in either village.

A lot of Hanborough’s more recent history, certainly from the Norman Conquest, is very closely connected to the fortunes or otherwise of Woodstock Park, the old Royal Palace, and from 1705, with Blenheim Palace; so to suggest as some local people have that we have no history, we actually have masses. Read on!

So, where do we start? Our parish name seems a good a place as any!

Hanborough is a parish made up of two villages, Church Hanborough and Long Hanborough, about a mile apart, between Bladon and Witney, in Oxfordshire. For the last hundred years or so, we have had a little bother deciding what our correct parish name should be.

Why are we called Hanborough ? Or is it Handborough with a ‘d’?

Rev. Robert Bailey, one of our esteemed past Rectors, tells us in his book that the search for the correct spelling for our village name was a long and arduous one because nobody was quite sure what the correct spelling was during his search while he was Rector (1920s). The clerk/scribe writing down our village details in the ‘Domesday Book’ in 1086 spelt our name Haneberge. Historians think that the name meant Hanna’s Barrow’ or ‘Hanna’s Fortified House’. Other experts in this field think it was more likely attributable to the Saxon Hageneberga which means Hagen’s Hill, or to really confuse you it could have been from the Anglo-Saxon Hanna which was the word used for Cock or Hill of the Cock".

It doesn’t really help us to decide which way our name should have been spelt in 1086 or any other time in our history. The name most favoured seems to be the Saxon, Hanna or Hagen’s Hill, as the original settlement in Church Hanborough was on a hill.

Anyway, by the 13th century the village’s name had settled into the spelling we would recognise today. It was recorded in the Eynsham Cartulary (Eynsham Abbey records) in 1268 as Hanborough. Unfortunately a clerk has really confused some people ever since by writing in the same Cartulary on June 23rd 1286 Handborough with a ‘d’. Maybe the clerk mistook a flourish in previous documents on the ‘n’ for a ‘d’. or perhaps he thought that is how it should have been spelt. Again, some experts disagree with this idea as they suggest it doesn’t look like a ‘d’ in the Eynsham Cartulary at all.

However, in 1310, only 30 years later, the Oseney register spelt it without the ‘d’.

The spelling was slightly different for many years but always without the ‘d’. Over two centuries later the name was recorded by Sir Henry Lee, (Ranger of Woodstock Park in 1572), as ‘Hanbourrowe’, a slightly different spelling to the past and present but still without the ‘d’. Maps from ‘Corpus Christi’ in 1605, Robert Morden’s maps 1695 to 1772 and two Ordnance Survey Maps from 1893 and 1919 that I have, all show Hanborough without the’d’.

Nevertheless, many times in the 18 and 1900’s we see the intrusive ‘d’ reappear on many documents and some maps, even legal documents, for example:

"James Walter of Oxford, certifieth that he surveyed the Rectory House of the Rectory of Handborough in the County of Oxford . . . . Sworn before me the 22nd day of February 1845. Frederick.J.Morrell".

When the new railway station was opened in 1853 the name board on the platform stated ‘Handborough for Blenheim.’ Although most of the station buildings were demolished in 1966/67, the rail authorities kept the old name board for several more years. When the new Post Office was built around the middle of the 20th century in what was called ‘The Parade’, its new name was, yes, your right, Handborough Post Office.

Several local residents have told us that during their school days they were told off quite severely by the teachers if they omitted the ‘d’ when writing the name Hanborough.

Even photo’s taken about the 1920s, (Packer, Oxfordshire County Archive) have captions saying Hanborough and Handborough, so even Mr. Packer was confused.

Even if Hanborough spelt with a ‘d’ was a mistake, did it really matter. Quite a few villages had numerous names with different spellings during their gestation. At least we only had two, or three, or four.!!!

New research by Mr Steve Griffiths, a long time Hanborough resident, has at last found the answer, which he will reveal in his book on this subject.

Chapter 2

Geology and Topography

How many of us wonder how the familiar landscape of our parish came to be as it is? What great natural forces in the remote past shaped these features?

Why, for instance, does our modest Evenlode stream flow gently at the bottom of a wide steep-sided valley; how is it that some of our garden soils are light and gravelly, and others obstinate, sticky clay? To answer these questions we need to take a closer look at the geology of the region.

The ground beneath our feet in Hanborough is composed of two very different kinds of material, known to geologists as Solid and Drift. The solid geology is the bedrock, belonging to the Jurassic period (c. 180-130 million years ago). During this period Oxfordshire lay beneath the sea and thus accumulated marine sediments that were later uplifted to form land.

In Hanborough these deposits comprise either yellow limestones, which can be seen on the slopes of the Evenlode valley and in the Hanborough railway cutting, or Oxford Clay, a fine blue-grey mudstone covering the plateau away from the valley. Both formations contain the fossils of marine organisms such as sea shells, ammonites, or fish teeth. Corals are common in the limestones. Most of the stone-built houses in the village were quarried from the local limestone, the most prominent working being Lay’s Quarry at the bottom of Swan Hill. In Pinsley Wood, a large depression marks the spot where stone was cut for the building of the Parish Church. Some of the older houses in the village still have roofing of the now worked-out Stonesfield Slate, a very hard limestone capable of being split into thin layers. As the name implies, this rock came mainly from the Stonesfield area. There were once miles of limestone walls marking field boundaries in the parish, but few remain today.

Much of the Jurassic geology is overlain by the Drift material, which has been deposited within the last million years, during the Ice Age. The topography of today is largely the result of forces at work during the Ice Age, which not only laid down the Drift but also cut into the Solid geology.

The Ice Age, or Quaternary as geologists prefer to call it, actually comprised numerous fluctuations between long bitterly cold periods and weather somewhat warmer than today. During the coldest periods, vegetation ceased to grow and the landscape became a barren surface of silts, sands, gravels and stones. Although the icecaps themselves never reached further south than the headwaters of the Evenlode, the Hanborough area became part of an enormous outwash zone where the formidable power of rushing meltwater loaded with glacial debris would have created a scene of utter chaos. The remnants of this debris surviving today are but a small fraction of the volume of material that must have been washed down by an ancient Evenlode swollen to fill the whole valley and overspilling it.

The oldest of the Drift deposits, termed the Northern Drift, may be seen in the fields west of the village. Their characteristics are large brown water-worn pebbles and cobbles made of quartzite that have been carried by the action of ice and water from the Midlands. Occasionally, stones are seen whose origin is as far away as Scotland. This material may be more than a million years old, and its widespread distribution in the Evenlode catchment indicates that at this time the Evenlode was the main river in the Upper Thames basin, while the present Thames was but a tributary! The fact that it lies on top of the hill, up to 35 metres above the valley floor, and yet is thought to be a river deposit, shows that uplift of the landscape has taken place since this gravel was laid down, and the present Evenlode has cut down below the original valley floor of the Northern Drift.

The next deposit to have survived is the so-called Hanborough Terrace, a thick bed of pea gravels underlying most of the village of Long Hanborough. It is composed of more local stones such as the Cotswold limestones. Geologists are not agreed on the complex question of the date of this terrace, but it is probably somewhere between 400,000 and 300,000 years old.

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Northern Drift deposits in Hanborough. The large stones are quartzite cobbles from the Midlands

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Long Hanborough SSSI on Church Road

These gravels were extensively quarried in the past, and the old pit face may still be seen on the west side of Church Road between Long Hanborough and Church Hanborough, part of which has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest or SSSI in local government terms. The deposits have yielded molluscan fossils indicative of a cold environment and vertebrate remains that suggest warmer conditions.

3.jpg

Ice wedges at Dukes Pit, (Millwood Vale) Long Hanborough, photographed in the early years of the 20th Century. (Courtesy British Geological Survey A3188.)

Examples of ice wedge casts occur, formed when the gravels broke up into large polygonal structures owing to shrinkage in intense cold periods. On warming, debris fell into the ‘wedges’.

At a later date, perhaps around 200,000 years ago, another gravel terrace was deposited by the Evenlode at a lower elevation on the valley sides. This is the Summertown-Radley Terrace which lies mainly in the south of the parish towards Eynsham.

Finally, the valley floor itself, which is mostly flat, is composed of the most recent geological deposit of all, a soft river silt called alluvium. This is the product of successive local river flooding over the past 10,000 years, after the end of the Ice Age. The complex geology described above has to be understood in order to appreciate the present-day topography. Hanborough parish is bounded on the north and east sides by the river Evenlode, a tributary of the Thames. At the northeast corner of the parish the Evenlode is joined by the river Glyme, which has been dammed artificially in Blenheim Park to form the lake.

South of this confluence, the river passes through a broad valley with gently sloping sides, until it flows into the Thames near Cassington. West of the junction with the Glyme, however, the Evenlode valley has cut a much steeper sided valley with a narrower floor, known to geomorphologists as the Evenlode Gorge. Through this gorge the river swings dramatically from side to side in a series of meanders stretching back to Stonesfield. The formation of these meanders may be related to the sudden drop in discharge at the end of the Ice Age, but the exact process is not understood. The remainder of the parish comprises a plateau sloping gently southwards from its highest point, some 107 metres above sea level, near North Leigh Common.

Prehistory to the Norman Conquest

Hanborough is exceptionally fortunate in having yielded evidence of human life from several very remote periods.

Britain’s earliest inhabitants arrived here perhaps as long as 700,000 years ago, but evidence for human occupation at this time so far comes only from the coastal cliffs of East Anglia. Recently however, ancient stone tools were discovered lying on the Northern Drift in a ploughed field in Freeland, and since then more have been located in Combe and Hanborough. They comprise handaxes, choppers, flakes and cores that have been fashioned from the quartzite cobbles of the Drift. Evidently early man found these deposits, made stone tools from them and dropped them more or less in the same place. As this Drift material has lain on the surface for more than half a million years, it is possible that the tools are some of the earliest in Britain, but because they lie on the surface, there is no way of dating them accurately. We can only say that the tool forms belong to the earliest period, in archaeological terms the ‘Lower Palaeolithic’, which terminated around 200,000 years ago.

4.jpg

Quartzite chopper from the Northern Drift

There is another Lower Palaeolithic find also from Hanborough, a flint handaxe. It was dug out of Duke’s Pit on the north side of Witney Road, close where Millwood Vale now stands, by Jack Whitley in 1938. This implement was retrieved from near the base of the Hanborough Terrace in the course of gravel extraction. Its position indicates that it had been transported in the gravels, rather than dropped on the land surface before the gravels were deposited.

But as it is in very sharp condition, it probably had not been transported far from its place of manufacture. It may be seen in the University Museum.

The hominid who made this implement probably roamed the vicinity some 300,000 to 400,000 years ago (once again the exact date is unresolved). He was not fully human, but belonged to an earlier species of mankind, probably Homo Erectus, one of the first hominid species to spread from the original African homeland. His brain size was only three-quarters the size of ours, and he would probably have walked upright but with some ape-like characteristics, such as a very strong brow ridge and receding forehead. Despite his smaller brain, he had the intelligence to acquire flint resources (the nearest flint rock is some 20 km from here) and to shape a nodule into a tolerably good, near symmetric tool, something which most modern residents of Hanborough would be unable to do!

Our distant ancestor shared the barren landscape with some big game, the bones and teeth of which were recovered from the same gravels. These included straight-tusked mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, wild horse and giant deer.

Flint handaxe from the Hanborough Terrace

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0………………………………..5cm

Man was certainly present in the area at the time when the next relic of the past, the Summertown-Radley Terrace, was deposited near City Farm. We can be sure of this because man-made implements have been found in remnants of this same terrace material at sites beyond the parish, e.g. at Stanton Harcourt. But when these gravels were quarried at City Farm in the 1960s, no implements were reported from them.

Once again, we take a long leap forward before there is more evidence of human activity. The Neanderthal people made occasional visits to Oxfordshire during the period 60-40,000 years ago but the nearest evidence of their presence comes from a handful of stone tools around Abingdon. This was generally a cold period, and Britain was gripped by another ice age of great length, culminating in an almost complete freeze-up from c. 25,000 to 13,000 years ago. During this period it is unlikely that there would have been any human presence, but as the warmer weather gradually returned to southern Britain from about 12,000 years ago, so vegetation, then animals, and finally humans ventured back.

By now they were fully modern in appearance. These Mesolithic peoples are known to have lived in the area from finds of their flint tools in other parts of Oxfordshire, although finds have not specifically been made in the parish.

The late Mesolithic period merges imperceptibly into the Neolithic, the first age of sedentary farming and pottery, from about 4000 BC. Here, we have more evidence of occupation on our doorstep.

A local farmer, Mr Hubert Busby, has retrieved a number of flint artefacts and debris from two different sites in the village. Perhaps the most interesting is a collection of everyday tools found near the top of Swan Hill in the soil of the ploughed field.

Finely worked Leaf Arrowhead Myrtle Farm, Neolithic period

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Pride of place in the collection goes to a beautifully made leaf-shaped arrowhead, so thin it is translucent. Among the other finds are scrapers, blades, waste flakes and cores (a core is the remaining piece of flint when no more flakes can be struck from it). The style of these pieces suggests that there may have been a settlement or a temporary camp of early Neolithic people at this point. Occasional finds of Neolithic flint material may be made anywhere in the Oxfordshire countryside, but a study conducted recently in the Evenlode valley between Stonesfield and Long Hanborough has revealed a series of village settlements located in successive arcs of the meanders of the river. The arrowheads, blades, awls, scrapers and cores from these sites indicate prolonged occupation from before 3000 BC to after 2000 BC. The presence of hammer-stones and potboilers (pieces of flint with crazed surfaces indicating they have been heated on a fire and plunged into cold water) help